Ovid

Ovid, Latin in full Publius Ovidius Naso
(born March 20, 43 bce, Sulmo, Roman Empire [now Sulmona, Italy]—died 17 ce, Tomis, Moesia [now Constanţa, Rom.]), Roman poet noted especially for his Ars amatoria and Metamorphoses. His verse had immense influence both by its imaginative interpretations of classical myth and as an example of supreme technical accomplishment.

Life

Publius Ovidius Naso was, like most Roman men of letters, a provincial. He was born at Sulmo, a small town about 90 miles (140 km) east of Rome. The main events of his life are described in an autobiographical poem in the Tristia (Sorrows). His family was old and respectable, and sufficiently well-to-do for his father to be able to send him and his elder brother to Rome to be educated. At Rome he embarked, under the best teachers of the day, on the study of rhetoric. Ovid was thought to have the makings of a good orator, but in spite of his father’s admonitions he neglected his studies for the verse-writing that came so naturally to him.

As a member of the Roman knightly class (whose rank lay between the commons and the Senate) Ovid was marked by his position, and intended by his father, for an official career. First, however, he spent some time at Athens (then a favourite finishing school for young men of the upper classes) and traveled in Asia Minor and Sicily. Afterward he dutifully held some minor judicial posts, the first steps on the official ladder, but he soon decided that public life did not suit him. From then on he abandoned his official career to cultivate poetry and the society of poets.

Ovid’s first work, the Amores (The Loves), had an immediate success and was followed, in rapid succession, by the Epistolae Heroidum, or Heroides (Epistles of the Heroines), the Medicamina faciei (“Cosmetics”; Eng. trans. The Art of Beauty), the Ars amatoria (The Art of Love), and the Remedia amoris (Remedies for Love), all reflecting the brilliant, sophisticated, pleasure-seeking society in which he moved. The common theme of these early poems is love and amorous intrigue, but it is unlikely that they mirror Ovid’s own life very closely. Of his three marriages the first two were short-lived, but his third wife, of whom he speaks with respect and affection, remained constant to him until his death. At Rome Ovid enjoyed the friendship and encouragement of Marcus Valerius Messalla, the patron of a circle which included Tibullus, whom Ovid knew only for a short time before his untimely death. Ovid’s other friends included Horace, Sextus Propertius, and the grammarian Hyginus.

Having won an assured position among the poets of the day, Ovid turned to more ambitious projects, the Metamorphoses and the Fasti (“Calendar”). The former was nearly complete, the latter half finished, when his life was shattered by a sudden and crushing blow. In 8 ce the emperor Augustus banished him to Tomis (or Tomi; near modern Constanţa, Romania) on the Black Sea. The reasons for Ovid’s exile will never be fully known. Ovid specifies two, his Ars amatoria and an offense which he does not describe beyond insisting that it was an indiscretion (error), not a crime (scelus). Of the many explanations that have been offered of this mysterious indiscretion, the most probable is that he had become an involuntary accomplice in the adultery of Augustus’ granddaughter, the younger Julia, who also was banished at the same time. In 2 bce her mother, the elder Julia, had similarly been banished for immorality, and the Ars amatoria had appeared while this scandal was still fresh in the public mind. These coincidences, together with the tone of Ovid’s reference to his offense, suggest that he behaved in some way that was damaging both to Augustus’ program of moral reform and to the honour of the imperial family. Since his punishment, which was the milder form of banishment called relegation, did not entail confiscation of property or loss of citizenship, his wife, who was well-connected, remained in Rome to protect his interests and to intercede for him.

Exile at Tomis, a half-Greek, half-barbarian port on the extreme confines of the Roman Empire, was a cruel punishment for a man of Ovid’s temperament and habits. He never ceased to hope, if not for pardon, at least for mitigation of sentence, keeping up in the Tristia and the Epistulae ex Ponto (“Letters from the Black Sea”) a ceaseless stream of pathetic pleas, chiefly through his wife and friends, to the emperor. But neither Augustus nor his successor Tiberius relented, and there are hints in the later poems that Ovid was even becoming reconciled to his fate when death released him.

Works

Ovid’s extant poems are all written in elegiac couplets except for the Metamorphoses. His first poems, the Amores (The Loves), were published at intervals, beginning about 20 bce, in five books. They form a series of short poems depicting the various phases of a love affair with a woman called Corinna. Their keynote is not passion but the witty and rhetorical exploitation of erotic commonplace; they chronicle not a real relationship between Ovid and Corinna (who is a literary construct rather than a real woman) but all the vicissitudes of a typical affair with a woman of the demimonde.

In the Heroides (Heroines) Ovid developed an idea already used by Propertius into something like a new literary genre. The first 15 of these letters are purportedly from legendary ladies such as Penelope, Dido, and Ariadne to absent husbands or lovers. The letters are really dramatic monologues, in which the lessons of Ovid’s rhetorical education, particularly the exercises called ethopoiea (“character drawing”), are brilliantly exploited. The inherent monotony of subject and treatment, which all Ovid’s skill could not completely disguise, is adroitly transcended in the six later epistles of the Heroides. These form three pairs, the lover addressing and being answered by the lady. In them, Ovid’s treatment of his literary sources is particularly ingenious; the correspondence of Paris and Helen is one of antiquity’s minor masterpieces.

Turning next to didactic poetry, Ovid composed the Medicamina faciei, a witty exercise of which only 100 lines survive. This frivolous but harmless poem was followed in 1 bce by the notorious Ars amatoria, a manual of seduction and intrigue for the man about town. The lover’s quarry, in this work, is ostensibly to be sought in the demimonde (i.e., among women on the fringes of respectable society who are supported by wealthy lovers), and Ovid explicitly disclaims the intention of teaching adultery; but all of his teaching could in fact be applied to the seduction of married women. Such a work constituted a challenge, no less effective for being flippant, to Augustus’ cherished moral reforms, and it included a number of references, in this context tactless if not indeed provocative, to symbols of the emperor’s personal prestige. The first two books, addressed to men, were the original extent of the work; a third, in response to popular demand, was added for women. For many modern readers the Ars amatoria is Ovid’s masterpiece, a brilliant medley of social and personal satire, vignettes of Roman life and manners, and charming mythological digressions. It was followed by a mock recantation, the Remedia amoris, also a burlesque of an established genre, which can have done little to make amends for the Ars. The possibilities for exploiting love-elegy were now effectively exhausted, and Ovid turned to new types of poetry in which he could use his supreme narrative and descriptive gifts.

Ovid’s Fasti (“Calendar”) is an account of the Roman year and its religious festivals, consisting of 12 books, one to each month, of which the first six survive. The various festivals are described as they occur and are traced to their legendary origins. The Fasti was a national poem, intended to take its place in the Augustan literary program and perhaps designed to rehabilitate its author in the eyes of the ruling dynasty. It contains a good deal of flattery of the imperial family and much patriotism, for which the undoubted brilliance of the narrative passages does not altogether atone.

The Metamorphoses is a long poem in 15 books written in hexameter verse and totaling nearly 12,000 lines. It is a collection of mythological and legendary stories in which metamorphosis (transformation) plays some part, however minor. The stories are told in chronological order from the creation of the universe (the first metamorphosis, of chaos into order) to the death and deification of Julius Caesar (the culminating metamorphosis, again of chaos—that is, the Civil Wars—into order—that is, the Augustan Peace). In many of the stories, mythical characters are used to illustrate examples of obedience or disobedience toward the gods, and for their actions are either rewarded or punished by a final transformation into some animal, vegetable, or astronomical form. The importance of metamorphosis is more apparent than real, however; the essential theme of the poem is passion (pathos), and this gives it more unity than all the ingenious linking and framing devices the poet uses. The erotic emphasis that had dominated Ovid’s earlier poetry is broadened and deepened into an exploration of nearly every variety of human emotion—for his gods are nothing if not human. This undertaking brought out, as his earlier work had not, Ovid’s full powers: his wit and rhetorical brilliance, his mythological learning, and the peculiar qualities of his fertile imagination. The vast quantities of verse in both Greek and Latin that Ovid had read and assimilated are transformed, through a process of creative adaptation, into original and unforeseen guises. By his genius for narrative and vivid description, Ovid gave to scores of Greek legends, some of them little known before, their definitive form for subsequent generations. No single work of literature has done more to transmit the riches of the Greek imagination to posterity. By 8 ce the Metamorphoses was complete, if not yet formally published; and it was at that moment, when Ovid seemed securely placed on a pinnacle of successful achievement, that he was banished to Tomis by the emperor.

Ovid arrived at his place of exile in the spring of 9 ce. Tomis was a semi-Hellenized port exposed to periodic attacks by the surrounding barbarian tribes. Books and civilized society were lacking; little Latin was spoken; and the climate was severe. In his solitude and depression, Ovid turned again to poetry, now of a more personal and introspective sort. The Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto were written and sent to Rome at the rate of about a book a year from 9 ce on. They consist of letters to the emperor and to Ovid’s wife and friends describing his miseries and appealing for clemency. For all his depression and self-pity, Ovid never retreats from the one position with which his self-respect was identified—his status as a poet. This is particularly evident in his ironical defense of the Ars in Book ii of the Tristia.

That Ovid’s poetical powers were not as yet seriously impaired is shown by his poem Ibis. This, written not long after his arrival at Tomis, is a long and elaborate curse directed at an anonymous enemy. It is a tour de force of abstruse mythological learning, composed largely without the aid of books. But in the absence of any sign of encouragement from home, Ovid lacked the heart to continue to write the sort of poetry that had made him famous, and the later Epistulae ex Ponto make melancholy reading.

The loss of Ovid’s tragedy Medea, which he wrote while still in Rome, is particularly to be deplored; it was praised by the critic Quintilian and the historian Tacitus and can hardly have failed to influence Seneca’s play on the same theme.

Assessment

In classical antiquity, Ovid’s influence on later Latin poetry was primarily technical. He succeeded in the difficult task of adapting the intractable Latin language to dactylic Greek metres, and thereby perfected both the elegiac couplet and the hexameter as all-purpose metres and as instruments of fluent communication. Ovid’s verse is remarkable for its smoothness, fluency, and balance. The elegance of his verse masks its extreme artificiality, and the casual reader may overlook the quiet ruthlessness of Ovid’s linguistic innovations, particularly in vocabulary. Ovid’s hexameters in the Metamorphoses are a superb vehicle for rapid narrative and description.

To this technical facility Ovid added an unrivaled power of invention that enabled him to exploit ideas and situations to the utmost, chiefly through the use of vivid and telling details. His undoubted rhetorical gifts have caused him to be dubbed insincere and even heartless, and he seems indeed to have lacked the capacity for strong emotion or religious feeling. Judged, however, by his gift for fantasy, Ovid is one of the great poets of all time. In the Metamorphoses he created a Nabokovian caricature of the actual world, the setting for a cosmic comedy of manners in which the endless flux and reflux of the universe itself is reflected in the often paradoxical and always arbitrary fate of the characters, human and divine. Pathos, humour, beauty, and cruelty are mingled in a unique individual vision. Ovid’s talent is not of that highest order which can pierce the outward semblance of men and things and receive intimations of a deeper reality; but what he could do, few if any poets have ever done better.

Influence

Ovid’s immense popularity during his lifetime continued after his death and was little affected by the action of Augustus, who banned his works from the public libraries. From about 1100 onward Ovid’s fame, which during late antiquity and the early Middle Ages had been to some extent eclipsed, began to rival and even at times to surpass Virgil’s. The 12th and 13th centuries have with some justice been called “the age of Ovid.” Indeed, he was esteemed in this period not only as entertaining but also as instructive, and his works were read in schools. His poetry is full of epigrammatic maxims and sententious utterances which, lifted from their contexts, made a respectable appearance in the excerpts in which medieval readers often studied their classics. Ovid’s popularity was part, however, of a general secularization and awakening to the beauties of profane literature; he was the poet of the wandering scholars as well as of the vernacular poets, the troubadours and minnesingers; and when the concept of romantic love, in its new chivalrous or “courtly” guise, was developed in France, it was Ovid’s influence that dominated the book in which its philosophy was expounded, the Roman de la rose.

Ovid’s popularity grew during the Renaissance, particularly among humanists who were striving to re-create ancient modes of thought and feeling, and printed editions of his works followed each other in an unending stream from 1471. A knowledge of his verse came to be taken for granted in an educated man, and in the 15th–17th centuries it would be difficult to name a poet or painter of note who was not in some degree indebted to him. The Metamorphoses, in particular, offered one of the most accessible and attractive avenues to the riches of Greek mythology. But Ovid’s chief appeal stems from the humanity of his writing: its gaiety, its sympathy, its exuberance, its pictorial and sensuous quality. It is these things that have recommended him, down the ages, to the troubadours and the poets of courtly love, to Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, J.W. von Goethe, and Ezra Pound.